‘Let’s get on the tilt-a-whirl / then watch the house of mirrors swirl’ … girl walks through a hall of mirrors.
Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP

Carnival

Pretty eyes, he said to you,let’s get ticketslet’s get twolet’s get on the tilt-a-whirlthen watch the house of mirrors swirl

Pretty lips, he said to me,let’s get ticketslet’s get threelet’s get on the zipper wheelthen watch the house of mirrors reel

Pretty here and pretty there!Aren’t we sucha pretty pair?Pick a pretty, make a pass(just be careful of the glass)

Pretty that and pretty this!Come in closerfor a kiss(now we’re double, now we’re half)and watch the house of mirrors laugh.

This week’s poem is by Caitlin Doyle, an early-career poet whose formalist orientation draws on literary and oral Irish traditions. She writes: “As a first-generation Irish American, I grew up steeped in literature and music from Ireland, and I’ve always been compelled by the combination of story and song in Irish poetry. Some of my earliest and most memorable encounters with language came through the words of Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, WB Yeats, Sinéad Morrissey, Oliver Goldsmith, Eavan Boland, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Paula Meehan. Their work continues to sustain me.”

Carnival demonstrates the effectiveness of that “combination of story and song”, with each element being used to complement and complicate the other. The poem’s external patterning depends on the carefully interlocked symmetry and repetition we associate with songs and their pleasurable memorability, but the narrative itself is oblique and teasing, with the potential for carnivalesque disruption.

One of the reviewers quoted on Doyle’s website mentions her work in relation to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. It’s a helpful connection for this particular poem, which shares some of Rossetti’s brightly dancing rhythm, and touches on similar themes, such as female solidarity as a moral and possibly erotic challenge to predatory heterosexual commerce. Readers could easily imagine that the two young women implied in Carnival, are Rossetti’s Lizzie and Laura in contemporary guise, with the poem itself spoken by Lizzie, as the original dominant force of resistance. As with Goblin Market, Carnival would be misread if considered as a poem for children. If its form is close to that of nursery rhyme, it is a suspect, parodic relationship, underlining corruption rather than innocence.

Carnivals and funfairs in popular culture are favourite scenes of transgression and sometimes horror. Cheerful, obsessively repetitive music is often the accompaniment to events on screen, under cover of which grotesquery builds up to violence. The poem plays a similar, circular, funfair tune in its four, rhymed stanzas. But its narrative is only partly geared towards suspense, initially describing a seduction that has already happened, and which has perhaps been averted or transformed, and certainly survived by the speaker. She has not been silenced. We eavesdrop on her summary, and try to deduce what has taken place between the three players, the presumed two women and the single man.

An unexpected line break splits the trochaic tetrameter in the third stanza, after “such”. The break is timed to redistribute the second foot, so instead of “Aren’t we such a / pretty pair?” we get “Aren’t we such / a pretty pair?” It’s a minor but telling emphasis, which briefly disrupts the musical regularity of the carousel.

Doyle picks appropriate names for the carnival amusements. “Tilt-a-whirl” might evoke the effects not only of a “ride” but a spiked drink. There’s also the connotation of the “whirlwind” romance, and being “whirled off your feet” – an essential aspect of the submissive female experience as popular romantic fantasy has it. The brilliant coinage, “zipper wheel”, goes farther into sexual metaphor. It evokes movement in two directions simultaneously, as if the sexual trap redoubled in its force in the combination of “zip” and “wheel”.

In the last two stanzas, the speaker’s tone becomes increasingly parodic. “Pretty here and pretty there!” and “Pretty that and pretty this!” are exclamations that seem to parrot the false, seductive line of the flatterer, and mercilessly make fun of him and his limited vocabulary.

Carnival seems to ask if it’s possible for young women to set the “house of mirrors” whirling, reeling and finally laughing, and emerge unscathed. I feel inclined to view the poised, dance-like tread of the formal structure as a clue to an affirmative answer. The speaker and her sister or girlfriend have seized control of the situation, mirroring each other, mocking and excluding the would-be intruder, and finally overturning his house of sexual horror as they move in for a kiss. Through their superior wit and agility, they have reversed the status quo and established their own relationship on their own terms. The sexual predator has been disarmed. But less sanguine interpretations are perfectly feasible. The speaker may continue subject to manipulation by the puppet-master, her agency an illusion. We can’t be certain that either the speaker or the addressee remain consistently one and the same person: the third stanza, for example, could mark a shift to the male’s perspective, and a sinister self-parody. The poem is not telling us everything, and that restraint is part of its power.

Caitlin Doyle’s poems are published in various literary journals, including the Atlantic, Threepenny Review and Boston Review, and in anthologies such as Best New Poets and The Golden Shovel. Carnival first appeared in Unsplendid. Subtitled “an Online Journal of Poetry in Received and Nonce Forms”, it sets out its editorial manifesto here as a committed but open-minded argument for formal poetry, which will surely interest readers of this column.

Doyle is currently finishing her debut poetry collection. We wish her success and look forward to its publication.